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| - Social media posts claim to show a photo of a police officer who has gone missing in the UK, but it actually shows a soldier who died in the Washington DC plane crash. Local police forces operating in the UK have confirmed the posts are not real.
One post sharing the photo, which shows a man on public transport holding a young child, was posted in a local community group for East Devon. It says: “Police Officer Ryan Miller went missing yesterday morning here in #EastDevon His truck was found last night with his son inside but unfortunately, there is still no sign of him. He is 6’1” and 170 lbs.”
But the photo is not of a missing police officer named Ryan Miller—it actually shows a US Army soldier, Ryan O’Hara, who was crew chief of the Black Hawk helicopter involved in a mid-air collision with an American Airlines passenger jet on 29 January 2025. He was killed along with 66 others in the accident, and the cause of the crash is being investigated.
The Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at Parkview High School in Georgia, which Staff Sgt. O’Hara attended, shared the photo used in the hoax posts on Facebook on 1 February, saying: “Class of 2014, Ryan was a 4-year cadet at Parkview High School and loved by all who knew him. Ryan leaves behind a wife and 1-year-old son.”
The same hoax post with almost identical text has also been shared in community groups for Wolverhampton and Newport. Devon and Cornwall Police confirmed to Full Fact that the post is not genuine, while both West Midlands and Gwent police forces said they have no record of such a case in their regions, which include Wolverhampton and Newport.
There are other clues that these posts aren’t genuine. They refer to a “silver alert” being issued—a way of informing the public about missing vulnerable people, for example, those who are elderly or have dementia and other conditions—that only operates in the US. Some of the posts also have the comment section disabled, which Derbyshire Police Online Safety team has previously said is a sign of a hoax.
We’ve written before about posts that falsely raise the alarm for missing children, elderly people, abandoned infants and injured dogs in Facebook community groups. They are often edited later to include links to surveys, freebies or cheap housing. Our guide offers some tips on how to identify such hoaxes, and you can find out more by watching an episode of BBC’s Rip Off Britain in which our investigation is featured.
This behaviour poses a risk to user engagement with local community groups, which can become overwhelmed with false information. We’ve written to Facebook’s parent company Meta expressing concerns about how these hoax posts can flood community groups, and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem.
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